Thomas Palmer
President and Chief Executive Officer at Newmont
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. Please note our cautionary statement and refer to our SEC filings, which can be found on our website. Today I'm joined by my executive leadership team, including Natascha Viljoen and Karyn Ovelmen, and we'll all be available to answer your questions at the end of the call. I'd also like to take a moment to acknowledge our friend and colleague, Rob Atkinson, our chief operating officer for the past five years. Rob will leave Newmont in early May, although his legacy will endure. Through his visible self leadership, Rob has driven our fatality risk management program achieving five years fatality free performance. Throughout the pandemic, Rob navigated our operations through challenges including periods of care and maintenance, border closures and vaccine implementation. Rob also represented the very best of our values when he guided penasquito through two major challenges, resolving a community block cave in 2019 and an unjustified strike last year. In both situations, Rob found sustainable solutions that protected the long term value of Newmont. Over the last five months, Rob and Natascha have conducted a thorough handover of accountabilities. Rob will remain with us to support Natascha and me before finishing up and heading back to the UK to spend more time with family.
Before we get started, it is with great sadness that I share the tragic news regarding a fatal incident at our recently acquired Brucejack operation on December 20th last year. I'd like to take a moment to remember our colleague, Adam Kennedy. Adam was only 44 years old. He was a partner, a son, a brother, an uncle, a best friend and a valued colleague. Our condolences go out to Adam's loved ones during this difficult time, and we are again reminded how important it is to maintain a sense of chronic unease when it comes to the safety of everyone who works at Newmont. Any fatality is totally unacceptable. We fully understand the fatality risks in our industry and the critical controls that need to be in place at all times to manage them. So we have been taking the time to conduct a safety reset across all Newmont sites, not just the five new to Newmont operations, with a laser focus on the implementation of our fatality risk management system. This reset work includes training delivered by our line leaders, our Manager Directors, our General Managers, and our Senior Health and Safety Leaders, training on our fatality risk management standards and our critical control verification process. We are also concluding our thorough investigation into this tragic incident, which is being led by Dave Thornton, the Managing Director of our Africa Business Unit. We are applying the lessons learned from this investigation at all of our managed operations globally, and we will share them widely with our mining industry peers. Nothing is more important than our commitment to the health and safety of our workforce, and we are determined to create an environment where every person working at Newmont, across all locations, returns home safe and well to their families and loved ones at the end of each and every shift.
Turning to our performance in 2023, Newmont finished the year with a solid fourth quarter putting us in line with the revised standalone outlook that we issued following the resolution of the strike at Penasquito. In summary, we produced five and a half million ounces of gold at all in sustaining costs of $1,444 an ounce. In addition to gold, we produced nearly 900,000 gold equivalent ounces from copper, silver, lead and zinc over the course of the year. This performance enabled us to deliver $4.2 billion in adjusted EBITDA, return more than $1.4 billion to shareholders, and end the year with liquidity above $6 billion.
In a few minutes, Natascha and I will expand on how we expect to improve upon this performance in 2024 and beyond with a focus on delivering meaningful value to our shareholders. But before we do that, I would like to describe how we are transforming our business into a unique collection of the world's best gold and copper operations and projects following last year's transaction. When we announced our binding agreement to acquire Newcrest in May last year, we outlined a powerful value proposition built around four key commitments. First, to set the new sustainability standard and strength the Newmont's position as the gold sector's recognized sustainability leader. Second, to create the industry's strongest portfolio of world class gold and copper assets in the most favorable mining jurisdictions. Third, to deliver $500 million of annual synergies and realize over $2 billion in cash from portfolio optimization. And finally, to continue driving a disciplined balanced approach to capital allocation.
After closing the transaction on November 6 last year, the integration of the five new operations into our Newmont operating model has been progressing very well, and as we enter this critically important year of integration and transformation, I'll be holding myself and my executive leadership team accountable for delivering on these commitments, and this will be our key focus in 2024.
To support this work earlier today, we announced four key actions that together will enhance our ability to deliver on our clear and consistent strategy. First, we plan to divest six high quality but non-core assets this year. From this point forward, our world class portfolio will consist entirely of tier one and emerging tier one operations and districts, and it will have a significant exposure to growth in copper and gold from our industry leading organic project pipeline.
Second, we provided our 2024 and five year outlook giving a clear picture of the work we are doing today to expand margins and appropriately sequence our projects to deliver sustainable value. Third, with the clarity, simplicity and focus that our tier one portfolio provides, we have committed to deliver a further $500 million in cost and productivity improvements across the entire portfolio. And these improvements are over and above our synergy commitment from the Newcrest acquisition, we expect to hit this $500 million annual run rate of improvement by the end of 2025. And finally, we announced a balanced shareholder return framework consisting of a $1 per share annualized base dividend and a new $1 billion share repurchase program.
Our go forward Newmont portfolio is focused on tier one gold and copper operations and projects located in the world's most favorable mining jurisdictions, and it has four key features. First, it contains 10 Tier 1 operations representing more than half of the world's Tier 1 gold mines in the Newmont portfolio. Second, it has three emerging Tier 1 operations that each has a clear path for growth. And we have the opportunity to create a Tier 1 District in British Columbia, a District in which Newmont will be operating for at least the next century. And third, it has an unmatched organic development pipeline with six large scale copper gold projects. And fourth, underpinning our Tier 1 portfolio is the industry's most robust foundation of reserves and resources.
Going forward, Newmont has the industry's largest gold resource base, and we also have the largest base of copper resources in the gold industry. To put these numbers into perspective, Newmont has an almost 30% larger gold reserve resource base than our nearest peer, and we have a 40% larger copper reserve resource base than our nearest gold peer.
No other gold producer in the world can offer the depth and quality that Newmont's Tier 1 portfolio can today. Later on, I'll provide a little bit more color about Newmont's longer term outlook and the exciting gold and copper opportunities ahead of us. But first, I'd like to step back and give some insight into how we are framing the year ahead. 2023 brought with it a number of unique challenges which are now firmly behind us, 120 day labor dispute at Penasquito, asset integrity issues that were inherent in the original design of equipment at Harpo and Wildfires in Canada, impacting Illinois. Those three events ended our final production number did not reflect the full capability of our assets. As we emerge on the other side of these events, I am proud of the decisions that we took to protect the long-term interests of our company rather than looking to seek short-term expedient solutions. However, I am also not happy with the underlying level of our operating performance. We have the opportunity to improve our compliance to mine plans, to improve our fixed and mobile equipment reliability, and to improve our mill throughputs and recoveries.
So our focus for 2024 will be on safely integrating new teams, new operations into our Newmont operating model and culture, transforming our portfolio and laying the groundwork for sustainable operating performance, margin expansion and strong returns. Finally, this morning, we also announced that we have extended the completion date and increased the projected capital cost for our Tanami 2 expansion project. In the second half of last year, we completed the concrete lining of the top half or 700 meters of this one and a half kilometer deep production shaft. This milestone gave us the opportunity to assess the condition of the known overbreak and ground conditions at the very bottom of the shaft, as well as incorporate the lessons learned from lining the top half of the shaft into the costs and schedule for the run home. We have critically assessed a number of options to safely address the known overbreak and line the lower section of the shaft. This work included key third party reviews before we landed on a method, and it was this methodology and subsequent decision that has informed the cost and schedule update we provided today.
Although I'm not happy with the extension of time and cost, I am confident that we have chosen a method that is safe and will ensure the shaft construction is of the quality necessary to reliably service Tanami's prolifical body for many, many years to come. So with that, I'll hand it over to Natascha to walk you through our operational priorities for 2024 and what we are doing to ensure that we deliver on our commitments this year. Over to you, Natascha.
